Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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Some critics are unfair, but not all of them

Peter Beinert, writing for Atlantic Monthly, makes a fascinating case in defense of those who are highly critical of President Obama.

Yes, some of the criticism is race-based … but not all of it, not by a long shot. The article attached here is worth reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/radical-republican-opposition-is-not-new/361536/

He takes U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson to task for making some outrageous claims about how Barack Obama has been singled out merely because of his race. Here’s what Beinert writes: “I never saw George Bush treated like this. I never saw Bill Clinton treated like this with such disrespect,” Thompson told a radio show. “That Mitch McConnell would have the audacity to tell the president of the United States … that ‘I don’t care what you come up with we’re going to be against it.’ Now if that’s not a racist statement I don’t know what is.”

Beinert notes that Thompson then said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t like being black, which on its face is a preposterous notion.

Obama’s critics have been harsh. Have they been any more strident than those who went after, say, Preident Bill Clinton? Hardly.

Beinert makes some interesting comparisons between the two presidents’ critics. My all-time “favorite” criticism of Bill Clinton came from the late preacher Jerry Falwell, who sponsored a video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that suggested — no, it actually accused — that Bill and Hillary Clinton orchestrated the murder of long-time friend and adviser Vince Foster, who committed suicide early in the Clinton presidency.

Let’s also point out here that Beinert is a left-leaning journalist who generally is friendly toward policies advocated by progressive politicians.

He is right to calm down those who suggest things such as those brought forward by Rep. Thompson that all criticism of President Obama is race-based and is uniquely harsh.

Bill Clinton surely would disagree.

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Vise tightens around Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin may be an atypical world leader, coming as he does from a world of spooks.

He does, however, hang with people with lots of money — which doesn’t make him much different from other heads of state and/or government.

Thus, the increased sanctions announced today by President Obama just might persuade the Russian leader to end his effort to foment unrest in Ukraine.

http://time.com/79080/russia-ukraine-putin-obama-sanctions/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fswampland+%28TIME%3A+Swampland%29

The White House announced that it is implementing further economic hardship on individuals and companies close to Putin. Obama called it a “calibrated effort” designed to inform Putin of the folly of his continued presence in Ukraine’s sovereign affairs.

The sanctions already announced have had an impact. The Russian ruble’s value has plummeted, along with the Russian stock exchange. Russian investments have tanked.

Have the efforts persuaded Putin to back off? No. They have, however, persuaded the Russians to seek a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, which exploded several months ago with the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Russia president and the subsequent annexation of Crimea into Russia.

We’ve seen a lot of blustering among Russians, Americans, NATO and the European Union. No one should really believe all-out war is going to erupt, despite claims by both sides that the other guys want to start a shooting war.

“The goal here is not to go after Mr. Putin, personally,” Obama said. “The goal is to change his calculus with respect to how the current actions that he’s engaging in in Ukraine could have an adverse impact on the Russian economy over the long haul.”

Actually, Mr. President, the goal seems to be to go after Putin “personally,” which is OK with me and I am guessing a lot of other Americans.

Make him squirm.

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Liar, liar …

Let’s talk briefly one more time about lies and lying.

President Obama’s critics accuse him of “lying” about the Affordable Care Act, specifically about the pledge he made that Americans can “keep their doctor if they so wish.” It turns out, with the unveiling of the ACA, that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Republicans jumped all over Obama for “lying” to Americans.

The dictionary defines “lying” as the intentional telling of an untruth. To suggest someone is lying is to know beyond a doubt the person made a statement knowing it is untrue.

Did the president knowingly assert the “keep-your-doctor” pledge knowing it wasn’t necessarily true? I don’t know, and neither do his critics.

I also need to revisit one more time the so-called “lies” President Bush told us about whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The president used WMD as a reason for going to war.

We invaded Iraq in March 2003, looked high and low for those WMD. We found none.

Intelligence analysts all over the world said Saddam had the WMD. Secretary of State Colin Powell said so in a statement to the United Nations. Were they lying? Did they purposely tell a falsehood? I don’t know that any more than I know that Barack Obama “lied” about the ACA.

I just have grown weary of the casual use of this particular “L” word.

How about cooling it until someone can produce incontrovertible proof that he or she is a true-blue mind reader?

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Is race a factor?

Leonard Pitts Jr. poses an interesting question to President Obama’s critics who contend their criticism ha nothing to do with his race.

What would the criticism look like if race was a factor?

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/apr/21/leonard-pitts-jr-what-would-it-look-like/

Pitts, of course, is African-American, just like the president. So, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist is likely to be more sensitive to specific elements of the criticism that has been leveled at Obama since he took office in January 2009.

I have many friends and acquaintances who tell me time and again that race has nothing to do with their dislike of the 44th president of the United States. However, here is what Pitts wrote in a recent column:

“I mean, we’re talking about a president who was called ‘uppity’ by one GOP lawmaker, ‘boy’ by another and ‘subhuman’ by a GOP activist, who was depicted as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor by opponents of his health care reform bill, as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop by an aide to a GOP lawmaker and as an ape by various opponents, who has been dogged by a ‘tea party’ movement whose earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included the Council of Conservative Citizens, infamous for declaring the children of interracial unions ‘a slimy brown glop’; who was called a liar by an obscure GOP lawmaker during a speech before a joint session of Congress; and who has had to contend with a yearslong campaign of people pretending there is some mystery about where he was born.”

Interesting, don’t you think?

No other prominent politician in my memory ever has been called such things by his or her foes. It’s the tone, the intensity of which defies reason.

Those who dislike the president can hide behind their policy differences, they can say all they want that race doesn’t matter to them one little bit.

I try like the dickens to accept what they say and accept that they simply disagree with his policies. To be clear, none of my friends ever has used the language that Pitts cites in his column. However, he is spot on to call attention to these statements that have been whispered and shouted at the same time.

Is race a factor in this intense loathing of the president? I have to say “yes.”

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Phone call symbolizes enmity

A simple phone call, that’s all it was supposed to be.

But now, as Politico.com has noted, the two principals in that conversation cannot even agree on its nature.

President Obama blistered congressional Republicans over their refusal to enact comprehensive immigration reform; then he telephoned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. Did the two men talk about immigration reform or did they, as the White House said, exchange pleasantries as the president wished Cantor, who is Jewish, a happy Passover?

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/immigration-barack-obama-eric-cantor-105764.html?hp=f2

Cantor responded to Obama’s attack with one of his own.

To be honest, I’m wishing a plague on both sides of this matter.

I’m also believing Cantor is right that the president and his team still haven’t learned how to work with the very people they need to enact their agenda, namely the members of Congress who happen to be from the other party.

It’s fair, however, to wonder whether the president simply has run out of patience with the loyal opposition.

The testy exchange went like this, according to Politico.com:

“The president called me hours after he issued a partisan statement which attacked me and my fellow House Republicans and which indicated no sincere desire to work together,” Cantor said in a statement. “After five years, President Obama still has not learned how to effectively work with Congress to get things done. You do not attack the very people you hope to engage in a serious dialogue,” he continued.

The president had said this earlier:

“Unfortunately, Republicans in the House of Representatives have repeatedly failed to take action, seemingly preferring the status quo of a broken immigration system over meaningful reform. Instead of advancing common-sense reform and working to fix our immigration system, House Republicans have voted in favor of extreme measures like a punitive amendment to strip protections from ‘Dreamers.'”

Both sides keep talking past each other, even as they insist it’s time to start working together.

There isn’t a Lyndon Johnson or Everett Dirksen among any of them.

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HRC fires another 'campaign' salvo

Hillary Rodham Clinton ventured to the city of my birth and delivered what sounds to me like yet another shot in her still-to-be-announced campaign for the presidency of the United States.

Speaking to the World Affairs Council of Oregon in Portland, Clinton said the current no-compromise political climate in Washington has hurt the United States.

Gee, do you think?

http://www.oregonlive.com/mapes/index.ssf/2014/04/hillary_clinton_tells_portland.html#incart_river_default

She’s saying far more than the obvious, of course. “Don’t vote for people who proudly tell you they won’t compromise,” she said to the crowd that jammed the hall to hear her words.

Indeed, Americans have gotten an overdose of what happens when zealots place their hands on the controls of government … which is that government stops working. They don’t know how to operate the levers. They refuse to listen to other points of view. They cannot bend for fear of breaking. They believe their way is the right way and other guys’ view will doom the country to, well, a miserable future.

Clinton is married to a man who knew how to compromise when he served as the 42nd president of the United States. Bill Clinton famously enacted the strategy called “triangulation,” in which he played both extremes — left and right — against each other to come up with policies that tracked more or less down the middle.

Indeed, the nation’s greatest legislators of the past 100 years or so knew “compromise” isn’t a four-letter word. They worked well with legislators on the other side: Ted Kennedy, Bob Dole, Hubert Humphrey, Everett Dirksen, Sam Rayburn, Mark Hatfield, Lyndon Johnson, the list can go on for a long time, but you get my drift.

My strong sense as well is that Clinton well might have included the current president in the “no compromise” category of modern politicians. Barack Obama blames Republicans for refusing to bend; the GOP fires back with some credibility that the president is afflicted with the same malady.

OK, so Clinton has said she’s “thinking about” running for president in two years. Duh!

Let’s prepare for a lot more of these kinds of talks from the former secretary of state and U.S. senator.

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LBJ legacy shines brightly

Fifty years ago this week, a long, tall Texan who was new in his job as president of the United States, signed a landmark bill into law that changed the face of the nation — and changed the political landscape in this country.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It guaranteed the rights of all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/civil-rights-act-50

He had become president under grievous conditions just six months earlier. President John F. Kennedy’s murder was still fresh in our minds and our broken hearts. The new man in the Oval Office took office and took charge of JFK’s unfinished legislative agenda, which included the Civil Rights Act.

It took a master legislator such as LBJ to finish the job. Prior to becoming vice president, Sen. Lyndon Johnson served as majority leader and had built a reputation as, shall we say, a supreme negotiator. He was unafraid to lay his hands on fellow senators to persuade them to vote his way … or else.

He took that skill to the presidency. Meanwhile, he had to persuade southern Democrats who weren’t as keen on the Civil Rights Act as many northern Republicans. LBJ did the deed and was told by one of his best Senate friends, arch-segregationist Richard Russell, D-Ga., that the bill would “cost us the South.”

Johnson perhaps knew what the political stakes were at the time he signed the bill, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

He put his name to it.

The LBJ Library in Austin this week is honoring the late president’s achievement. Four of his presidential successors — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — will be on hand in Austin to speak to the greatness of the Civil Rights Act.

What’s more, the Johnson family along with the library administration, are working overtime to burnish LBJ’s legacy to include far more than the tragedy and heartache of the Vietnam War.

Let’s hope they succeed. Lyndon Baines Johnson deserves high praise for enacting this law.

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Uninsured rate is falling

Politicians of all stripes have this way of spinning news in their favor and against their opponents’ interests.

That’s how the game is played. Take the Affordable Care Act. President Obama has declared something of a victory in that 7.1 million Americans signed up for the ACA before the March 31 open enrollment deadline; he had set a goal of 7 million signups. Republicans on the other hand declared the signup period a failure because of the rollout snafus and clumsiness that followed.

Now comes some interesting news from the Gallup Poll organization. The rate of uninsured Americans is the lowest since 2008, the final full year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/168248/uninsured-rate-lowest-2008.aspx

What does that mean?

Let’s see. The president said when he took office in 2009 that he intended to make health insurance available to more Americans and to bite into the number of uninsured Americans, which stood at 40 million or so, give or take.

The ACA passed. The enrollment period opened up. Americans got signed up through the exchanges. More Americans now have health insurance than before enactment of the law and, according to Gallup, the rate of uninsured Americans is at a six-year low.

The improvement is greatest among poor Americans and African-Americans, says Gallup. The rate of uninsured among all age groups has declined.

Is this an unqualified success for the Obama administration? It is not. The president made a couple of promises he couldn’t keep, such as the infamous “you can keep your doctor” pledge. The law will need to be tweaked, fine-tuned and improved along the way — which is the norm for almost all major pieces of legislation.

However, to say the ACA has “failed” and that it is going to “bankrupt the country” and create “death panels” to determine who lives is dishonest in the extreme.

The survey noted here suggests that the administration’s major goal — to provide health insurance to more Americans — has been met.

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No conspiracy theories, please

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Call me a non-conspiracy theorist.

I believe, for example, that:

* Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

* Men actually landed on the moon, beginning with Neil Armstrong’s “one small step … one giant leap” on July 20, 1969.

* Barack H. Obama was born in Hawaii — the 50th state to enter the Union — in August 1961 and, thus, is fully qualified to serve as president of the United States.

* Islamic madmen flew airplanes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and sought to fly a jetliner into the Capitol Building before they were thwarted by passengers on 9/11.

* Adolf Hitler killed himself in the Berlin bunker in April 1945 as the Red Army was closing in on his location.

* Elvis Presley actually died on Aug. 16, 1977 of a drug overdose in his Memphis, Tenn., bathroom.

I mention all these things because of the nutty theories being bandied about — to this day — about the fate of Malaysian Air Flight MH 370. I won’t repeat the goofy notions here.

My strong belief all along has been that something happened aboard that airplane to cause it to turn sharply off course on March 8. Its remains now are lying at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean, along with the remains of the 239 people on board.

Our hearts break for those who are awaiting official word of their fate.

I just wish society, fed by social media and goofball Internet “sources,” would cease with the crazy talk. Let the searchers do their job, let them find the flight recorder, retrieve it and let its contents reveal the truth without all the mindless second-guessing.

Enough already.

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Ted Cruz works for me, too

“I don’t work for the Party bosses in Washington, I work for 26 million Texans.” – Cruz

The above quote was tweeted this morning by the Heritage Foundation, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent conservative think tank.

The “Cruz” at the end of the tweet is none other than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who spoke to Heritage today. I caught a little bit of his remarks in which he criticized President Obama for saying at the State of the Union that if Congress doesn’t act on some legislation, “I will.” Cruz noted that Democrats stood and cheered the president. Cruz compared the moment to something out of Alice in Wonderland.

OK, back to the tweet.

He works for Texans, not party bosses. I admire that statement. He does work for us. A majority of Texans who voted in November 2012 elected Cruz to the Senate seat held formerly by another Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison who, I feel compelled to add, served in a manner that bore no resemblance to the way Cruz has served his bosses back home. Hutchison managed to work quite well with Democrats. As a Republican moderate, Hutchison didn’t feel the need to appeal to the base of her party. She knew that legislating requires compromise.

Yep, Cruz works for all Texans, not just those who voted for him. I was part of the minority of voters who in November 2012 cast a ballot for Democrat Paul Sadler. That doesn’t mean I disavow Cruz’s election. I honor it. However, I expect my elected representatives in Congress to honor my wishes too.

I support the Affordable Care Act. I do not want Congress to threaten to throw this nation into default by reneging on our debt obligations. I support the president’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine. I believe the president has been measured, nuanced and careful in conducting foreign policy. I favor comprehensive immigration reform. I believe long-term unemployed Americans deserve some help from the government as they look for jobs.

There’s more, but you get the idea. I take positions opposite of where Cruz stands. I am not alone, either.

He works for millions of Texans who oppose his world view. Those of us on the other side of the fence deserve to have our voices heard by our congressional delegation. That includes Sen. Cruz.

I understand the concept of majority rule. That doesn’t mean, though, that the minority is shut out completely. Sen. Cruz acts very much as though he’s listening only to those who agree with him.

He works for 26 millions Texans, not just some of us.